Content Creation: 8 Tools You Should Use To Create Better Content

Producing enough and engaging content is one of the biggest challenges for social media and content marketers. That is not only an impression we get from talking to entrepreneurs and marketers. The yearly content marketing benchmark compiled by Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs also confirms this:

Here are some tools, which can help you create more, better and more efficient content.

Tools to help you find topics for your content

This is a rather basic but very effective tool if you are running out of ideas for your blog.

You just put in some basic keywords from your niche and the Blog Topic Generator gives you 5 ideas for topics (or rather some kind of article headlines) you could cover.

2. Google

Really: Google? Yes! Google is not only powerful for bringing you traffic. It is, after all, a very useful and powerful search engine. Why not use it to come up with topics and ideas for your next blog post? Simply type in some keywords from your area of interest and let yourself get inspired by the content others have already created. (Never fall for the easy way out: stealing content or copying is not an option).

Also, Google can quickly provide you with research and statistics for your topics. Some statistics you may discover will probably be also useful to write about in an article.

Again this is a relatively simple tool to generate content ideas by just typing in some keywords.

The ContentIdeator will then give you some suggestions for article topics that you can consider. This tool works in a very similar way to the Hubspot Blog Topic Generator, but it can give you some additional ideas:

Tools to help you create better headlines

I already told you about the process Upworthy uses to come up with the perfect headline: Create 20 different headlines and pick the best.

Often it is not easy to come up with 20 headlines for one piece of content, especially since usually we tend to keep thinking in the same line and a lot of the headlines will simply be variations of others. To get some more (and hopefully very different) ideas for headlines you could try the Hubspot Blog Topic Generator or the Content Ideator. Just type in the most important keywords from your article and see which of the given headlines may match the piece of content you have.

Hopefully you now have at least a couple of headline suggestions for your articles from which to choose. In earlier articles I suggested you tweet the same article with different tweet texts to test which headline works best with your audience. That can only be for a very rough first impression.

To help you choose the best headline, there are some tools to help you analyze your headline with regard to how effective the headline is most likely to be.

To use this tool, you need an idea for your headline first. This tool then will analyze your headline based on some facts like the kind of words used and the usage of basic phrases that are known to get more attention.

To test this tool, I took some headlines for a past article Jonathan wrote, which we already tested with our Twitter accounts. Jonathan published the article with this title: “The Dark and Immoral Side of Content Marketing”. The headline analyzer scored this with 60 out of 100 % (which is not bad) and categorized the headline as “generic”.

The second headline we tested was: “It was near perfect #contentmarketing. And it’s probably killing people, right now.” This headline on Twitter showed approximately 30% more reactions. With the headline analyzer, this headline only scored marginally better than the first one (61 out of 100%). Which also means tools are not people…

I also tried one of the best-running headlines of all our articles: “Blogging Success: 7 Reasons New Bloggers Fail“. This scored 66 out of 100%, although the words used seem to be off balance. The high score is obviously due to the title being a list, which experience already told us all usually works well.

This tool analyzes your headline concerning the emotional marketing value. It states that most professional Copy Writers will score 30-40% in the EMV value while the best copywriters will go for 50 – 75% EMV. Let us take a look at the headlines we checked with the CoSchedue Headline Analyzer.

“The Dark and Immoral Side of Content Marketing” scored 37%. Not too bad.

“It was near perfect #contentmarketing. And it’s probably killing people, right now.” scored 50%EMV. So here now we can see the same kind of difference, Jonathan and I have seen when tweeting this article with the two different headlines.

“Blogging Success: 7 Reasons New Bloggers Fail” scores a poor 28,57%EMV, which hints that the tool may not take the particular emotional value of lists as headlines into account.

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Tools to help you write better content

The best online content is often the one which is easiest to read. Has a clear structure and uses simple sentences. Hemmingway App helps you identify the parts of your content which are hard to understand and tells you how to make them easier to read.

I checked with some text from the article “Blogging Success: 7 Reasons New Bloggers Fail” and you can clearly see that I am one of those writers who tend to write long and complicated sentences. I should have split the first sentence into several shorter ones:

As the HemmingwayApp does, Grammarly helps you to identify the sentences which are unnecessarily complicated.

It also corrects grammar and spelling. In addition, it also provides you with suggestions for words you already used several time thus making your writing more variable. I have already published a more thorough description of Grammarly in this article.

Tools to help you pep up your content with visuals

I love Canva. It is an easy to use and very straightforward tool for creating beautiful images in exactly the right sizes. The new Canva for work even allows you to resize magically an image you may have created for one social network to the dimensions needed for another.

Canva will not make your written content better, but images and graphics can add value to a piece of written content. To make your content more shareable in Social Media you need beautiful images in the right dimensions.

Canva can even help you create infographics by providing templates and ready-made elements which you can use to create your infographics.

There are many more tools that can help you with your content creation process. However, tools cannot create the content, engage your audience and add the personality. With all of these tools which tell you what to do, what content to create, which headlines to use: It is still you as the author, who stands behind the content. And you need to be happy with the content as well. I have had an editor edit a piece of content of mine, and afterward, I changed everything back to the original. The simple reason was: The edited text may have been “better” but it was not mine anymore. I firmly believe that you as a person count at least as much as formalities. A tool may tell you another headline is better; it is still you who have the final word.

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We were too! We’ve gone through more email marketing automation tools than we can remember, and we finally ended up with Drip. We’ll never go back. And the best part? It’s not just great, it’s also affordable!

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Thanks for these tools. Infographics is an interesting way for content marketing, and for this you can find some other free tools like Venngage, easel.ly, and more..

http://maverickexcel.com/ Promise Excel

Thanks for this great and timely post. i like Hubspot Blog topic Generator and ContentIdeator alot, they have helped me generate over 40 article headlines, i better start writing now Do you guys know about Quora? i think it is a powerful tool too.

David Butler

Thanks and great list. iPositioning is a new cloud app that helps Scout and discovery story ideas and content. The Story Sheet has active components to capture and store narrative, media, and key words.

Miss Lisa

Awesome article! Now a day’s many agencies are out there for content writing but I need an individual to write my research paper for me. If you are willing please let me know.

http://www.guitricks.com/ Ahmed Raza Ansari

It’s great. Thanks for share it! I have also a website http://www.guitricks.com/ and I regular write for it. Hope your written content would increase my writing skills.

http://nextisbest.co.in Vikas Singh

Very nice article. I would like to add some value. Recently I came across an information that Grammarly

is not mobile friendly. I am in touch with their product support for the same.